A Study on Gender Differences of English Speech Style in Public Places

Since the feminist social movement in the 1960s, western scholars and sociolinguists have done a lot of researches on the gender-differentiated speech styles. The various kinds of researches pertinent to gender differences in language have produced fruitful discoveries in the past few decades, but most researchers seem to neglect the importance of the context in which communications take place. What the present paper intends to do is to carry out a contextualized research of speech differences between men and women in the English language, to try to explain gender differences in speech styles, and to discuss the significance or practical implications of the study. The present paper adopts three sociolinguistic research methods: conversation analysis, questionnaire and interview. The author finds different speech styles between men and women in public contexts. That is, men are found to contribute much more talk than women do in their interactions with women. It is men who always violate the turn-taking model and take more turns in order to take control of the conversations. As for interruption, the result does not give a reasonable conclusion from the data collected. With respect to topic choice, the result shows the topics that women discuss in same-sex casual conversations are different from those of men to large degree.